Scarcity is considered a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. It underpins much of modern economics and is widely used as an explanation for social organisation, social conflict and the resource crunch confronting humanity's survival on the planet. It is made out to be an all-pervasive fact of our lives - be it of housing, food, water or oil. But has the conception of scarcity been politicized, naturalized, and universalized in academic and policy debates? Has overhasty recourse to scarcity evoked a standard set of market, institutional and technological solutions which have blocked out political contestations, overlooking access as a legitimate focus for academic debates as well as policies and interventions?

Theoretical and empirical chapters by leading academics and scholar-activists grapple with these issues by questioning scarcity's taken-for-granted nature. They examine scarcity debates across three of the most important resources - food, water and energy - and their implications for theory, institutional arrangements, policy responses and innovation systems. The book looks at how scarcity has emerged as a totalizing discourse in both the North and South. The 'scare' of scarcity has led to scarcity emerging as a political strategy for powerful groups. Aggregate numbers and physical quantities are trusted, while local knowledges and experiences of scarcity that identify problems more accurately and specifically are ignored. Science and technology are expected to provide 'solutions', but such expectations embody a multitude of unexamined assumptions about the nature of the 'problem', about the technologies and about the institutional arrangements put forward as a 'fix.' Through this examination the authors demonstrate that scarcity is not a natural condition: the problem lies in how we see scarcity and the ways in which it is socially generated.

Lyla Mehta is a sociologist and Research Fellow with the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK and an Adjunct Professor at the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

1. The Scare, Naturalization and Politicization of Scarcity
Lyla Mehta
2. Everybody’s Got the Fever: Scarcity and US National Energy Policy
Nicholas Xenos
3. The Ghosts of Malthus: Narratives and Mobilizations of Scarcity in the US Political Context
Betsy Hartmann

1. Economics and Scarcity: With Amartya Sen as Point of Departure?
   
Ben Fine
2. Deconstructing Economic Interpretations of Sustainable Development: Limits, Scarcity and Abundance
   
Fred Luks
3. Water Can and Ought to Run Freely: Reflections on the Notion of ‘Scarcity’ in Economics
   
Sajay Samuel and Jean Robert
4. A Bit of the Other: Why Scarcity Isn’t All It’s Cracked up to Be
   
Michael Thompson

1. ‘Scarcity’ as Political Strategy: Reflections on Three Hanging Children
   
Nicholas Hildyard
2. Seeing Scarcity: Understanding Soil Fertility in
   Africa
Ian Scoones
3. Chronic Hunger: A Problem of Scarcity or Inequity:
   
Erik Millstone
4. A Share Response to Water Scarcity: Moving beyond the Volumetric
   
Bruce Lankford
5.  Advocacy of Water Scarcity: Leakages in the Argument
   
Jasveen Jairath
6. The Construction and Destruction of Scarcity in Development: Water and Power Experiences in Nepal
   
Dipak Gyawali and Ajaya Dixit
7. Afterword: Look beyond Scarcity?
   
Lyla Mehta

FRANK TRENTMAN, Professor of History, Birbeck College, University of London, UK

MELISSA LEACH, Director, ESRC STEPS Centre and Professional Fellow, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK